The Abundant Community, John McKnight and Peter Block (2010)
/1. Communities have an amazing abundance of assets that remain hidden, untapped, or underutilized. Community building can have a major impact by encouraging people and institutions to open these assets for the benefit of all.
This belief in our communities as rich in assets requires a fundamental shift in our mindset from scarcity to abundance. In short, what we see in many aspects of our lives is a belief that there is not enough of anything, so we need to horde and protect what we have. There aren’t enough jobs, so I need to protect mine. There isn’t even enough money, so I need to get as much as possible and keep it locked up. There’s never enough time, so I need to keep mine all to myself and not give it away to others. And so on. This paradigm of scarcity shapes what we do and how we think in myriad subtle ways, but above all it makes it almost impossible for us to see our communities and our lives as non-zero-sum games. In other words, it prevents us from seeing what McKnight and Block and Feld and Wheatley and many others all see: making our gifts, talents, assets, and time available to others doesn’t mean that we then have less, it means that we have more. The only caveat is that we need others to play the same game.
Block and McKnight describe this set of beliefs in their Tenets of Abundance:
What we have is enough. We value what we have and find it satisfying. This is true about who we are personally and with respect to material goods. We do not need to operate on the half-full glass of scarcity to give value to things or qualities. We are more interested in abundance.
We have the capacity to provide what we need in the face of the human condition. We believe that this family and neighborhood [or other social system] have the capacity to collectively handle an uncertain future and to endure and transcend whatever faces us. We can imagine creating together a future beyond this moment. We can learn how to make visible and harvest what up to now has been invisible and treated as though it were scarce.
We organize our world in a context of cooperation and satisfaction. We don not need competition to motivate our children or ourselves. A productive economy does not need to be competitive. Association life can cooperatively produce what systems have been selling.
We are responsible for each other. This is the meaning of community. We take seriously the idealistic notion that our future is dependent on each of us and if one of use is not free, or valued, or participating in a full life, then these are not possible for any of us.
We live with the reality of the human condition. We understand what we can and cannot do. Sorrow, aging, illness, celebration, fallibility, failure, misfortune, and joy are natural and inevitable. Life is not a problem to be solved or services to be obtained.
On the basis of these tenets Block and McKnight say that competent communities organize around three properties:
- “Focus on the gifts [assets, talents, time] of its members.
- Nurture associational life.
- Offer hospitality, the welcoming of strangers.”
Now that we’ve looked at the first of these three, let’s turn to the second.
2. The abundance mindset is only half the story. The other half is connecting up individuals and associations to make the best use of those assets.
One could view the fundamental message of The Abundant Community as a story about creating more efficient markets. According to such a story, each community [=market] has unmet demand and hidden supply. The first step is to identify where that much-need supply is located [=discover the community's assets]. The second step is to create a better market mechanism for supply and demand to meet up. This is where the second central point of Block and McKnight’s work comes in. It says that we need some infrastructure for individuals and institutions to get together on a regular basis, hear what the others have to offer and what they need help with. When everyone does this matches between supply and demand will be found.
Of course, at one level this sounds like nothing more than simple common sense. And, of course, it is. The issue is that it doesn’t happen very much and this is because of another paradigm that needs to be addressed: fear. Much like the paradigm of scarcity, the paradigm of fear lives its belief that the world out there is nasty. There are secrets that must be kept, plans that need to be hidden, lawyers who must be feared, and markets that must be protected. The behavior that results from this mindset is one in which individuals and institutions – especially those with the greatest stores of assets, and therefore “the most to lose” – are very careful not to talk to one another. For instance, when media organizations call up large companies or other institutions, they are most often suspected of wanting to “catch them” and thus they are immediately directed to a PR person whose sole role it is to tell the media as little as possible. And other organizations are little different.
This paradigm of fear prevents individuals and institutions from putting their cards on the table, clearly stating what it is they are doing, where they might be able to help others, and where they could use some support. But this, Block and McKnight argue in the context of neighborhoods, is precisely what allows abundance to flourish. Here’s how they describe it:
Gifts [assets] become useful when they are connected to the gifts of others. Connected citizens are in association and create associational life. This certain kind of connecting is key to creating abundance in community.
And while the first key steps are to create and nurture these informal associations, where members of a community can gather to share their goals, gifts, and needs, another even great potential lies in connecting those associations together.
Many associations strengthen their local community in another way. This occurs when several of them join together to create a neighborhood association to improve the lives of all the residents. These associations of associations have proved to be the most powerful too for creating a community of abundance. The reason is clear. Every association is empowering and powerful, because it acts as the amplifier of the gifts, skills, and talents of each member. It is the principle community means of helping people give their gifts.
Our challenge is to envision how these two steps – identifying community assets and creating associations of associations – can be embodied in different kinds of communities. How is legacy media implicated in upholding the old paradigms? What role can media companies play in making these two paradigm shifts – from scarcity to abundance and from fear to trust? The Abundant Community does an invaluable job in pointing the way. It’s up to us to forge the paths.